Graham Hancock on Ancient Cultures and the Origins of Civilization (Interview Archive)

This conversation comes from A Psychology of the Future, an online summit hosted by Erik Lenderman that gathered people working in self-development, spirituality, neuroscience, medicine and related fields. Lenderman opens by welcoming his guest, Graham Hancock, who has spent decades writing about ancient cultures and where human civilization actually came from. Among his books are Fingerprints of the Gods, The Sign and the Seal, and Heaven's Mirror. He also acted as the main guide in the documentary Quest for the Lost Civilization, which puts forward the idea that many old cultures scattered across the planet could be far older than the standard timeline allows, and that they may trace back to a single civilization larger than anything our history classes describe.

Hancock thanks him and says it's good to be there. Lenderman explains that this particular session falls on the summit's Psychedelics Day, and that the plan is to cover ancient cultures along with the broader arc of Hancock's work.

Before anything else, Hancock corrects one omission. The list of books Lenderman read off left out Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind, published in 2005. That one, he points out, is his central work on psychedelics and their place in the human story. Lenderman takes the note and asks him to lay out the general shape of what he does.

Hancock wants to back up and start wider. He has been chasing alternative readings of the past for a very long time. The project he's most identified with is Fingerprints of the Gods, which came out in 1995 and examined the case for a great lost civilization from deep prehistory: something that flourished during the ice age and then vanished in a worldwide catastrophe roughly twelve and a half thousand years ago. He built a run of books around that idea.

Around the start of the 2000s, though, he wanted to go a different way. The thought was to write about human origins. Once he got into the serious research, he ran into a problem. Most of the human origins story struck him as genuinely tedious. Trace it from the last common ancestor we share with the chimpanzee, about six million years back, and follow it forward well past the point where anatomically modern humans turn up, and what you mostly find is a species cycling through the same behaviors over and over. No real change, no innovation, nothing that looks like spirituality. That flat stretch keeps going long after we had become anatomically modern.